Framing the Net

We're always talking about something else. Regardless of the subject at hand, we have other subjects in mind that help us say what we mean. According to cognitive science, all of our thought and speech is metaphorical. That is, we understand everything in terms of something else.

For example, time is not money, but it is like money, so we speak about time in terms of money. That's why we "save," "waste," "spend," "lose," "throw away" and "invest" time. Another example is life. When we say birth is "arrival," death is "departure," careers are "paths" and choices are "crossroads," we think and speak about life in terms of travel. In fact, it is almost impossible to avoid raiding the vocabularies of money and travel when talking about time and life.

The embodied nature of our conceptual systems — our frames — is profound. Why do we say happy is "up" and sad is "down"? Why do we compare knowledge with "light" and ignorance with "dark"? The answer is that we are diurnal animals that walk upright. If bats could talk, they might say good is dark and bad is light.

Of course, one subject might have many metaphors, and it is easy to mix them. In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson point out that ideas are framed in all the following ways: fashion ("old hat," "in style," "in vogue"), money ("wealth," "two cents worth, "treasure trove"), resources ("mined a vein," "pool," "ran out of"), products ("produced," "turning out," "generated"), plants ("came to fruition," "in flower," "budding"), and people ("gave birth to," "brainchild," "died off").

Yet none of those frames is as essential to ideas as what Michael Reddy calls the conduit metaphor. When we say we need to "get an idea across," or "that sentence carries little meaning," we are saying that ideas are objects, expressions are containers, and communications is sending.

Which brings us to the Internet.

Given the primacy of the conduit metaphor, it only makes sense that we speak of the the Internet as a "medium" through which "content" can be "uploaded," "downloaded" and "delivered" to "consumer" through "pipes." Dig deeper and we find transport language in TCP/IP (for Transmission Control Protocol/Internetworking Protocol), in "packets," in the "transport layer," in the File Transport Protocol (FTP) and in all the mail protocols.

Not surprisingly, those we call "carriers" frame the Net in terms of transport and property. They do that because they own "pipes" and sell use of them. In a 2005 Business Week interview, Ed Whiteacre, then the CEO of SBC (now AT&T) said of Google and other companies, "Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using."

Another common frame for the Net — and especially the Web — is real estate. That's why we say we have "sites" with "domains" and "locations" that we "architect," "design," "build" and "construct" for "visitors" and "traffic." We talk about going "on" the Net, and call it a "world," a "sphere," a "place," a "space" and an "environment" with an "ecology."

A third frame is publishing. This grows from Tim Berners-Lee's founding concept of the Web as an assortment of documents, connected by hypertext. Today we have "pages" that we "write," "author," "edit," "put up," "post" and "syndicate." When Dave Winer, one of blogging's inventors, improved its technology and practices with RSS — Really Simple Syndication — the Web became even more of a publishing platform.

Yet the Net is not a physical thing. It has no first costs. Its core protocols are barely encumbered by the concept of ownership. In fact, those who developed those protocols mostly operated on virtues which the open source community today characterizes as NEA:

1. Nobody owns it

2. Everybody can use it

3. Anybody can improve it

In the first two respects, the Net is like the periodic table. In the third respect the Net resembles only the free and open goods that grow in its own environment. Steve Larsen, CEO of the code source engine Krugle, estimates that the number of open source code bases now exceeds half a million.

Craig Burton characterizes the end-to-end architecture of the Net as a giant hollow sphere: the only geometric shape in which all "ends" are visible to all other ends. I've been calling this "the giant zero," because one of the Net's founding ideals is reducing toward zero the functional distance between any two people, or any two devices. Also the cost.

Unlike phone and cable systems, the Net was never meant to be understood, much less charged out, as minutes or channels. Those are mechanisms for organizing scarcity. The Net was built to support abundance. The closer it gets to zero in the middle, the more what it supports at the ends approaches the infinite.

The Net's use value so far exceeds its sale value that it's silly to subordinate the former to the frame of the latter. Yet that's what the carriers do with pricing and provisioning policies that prevent far more business than they enable. This is a legacy of what Bob Frankstoncalls The Regulatorium.

"As we establish the principle of neutrality," Bob writes, "we challenge the fundamental concept that the carriers own the transport for their own use in delivering services. We now create the services ourselves and it must be our infrastructure — not the carriers' private asset."

Comments (1)

Doc, reposting my comment from a year ago, when your essay first appeared. - Howard

Doc, A few notes in follow up to your Berkman@10 session, where I posited that hoary standby “the commons” as a heuristic, if not a framing, concept of ongoing relevance.

As one session participant mentioned, a discussion of framing would seem to presuppose an acknowledgement of, perhaps agreement on, desired ends. I see that Kevin Werbach states connectivity as an end goal in his Publius piece. That would be one on my list as well: a broadly accessible connectivity.

Jonathan Zittrain’s 2x2 thinking on the future of the internet maps two similarities to the study of CPRs. First is his quest for models of successful governance in the “communitarian” quadrant, which mirrors a project to which Ostrom and others have dedicated decades of research: synthesizing the design principles whereby CPR institutions are found to successfully govern long-term resource use. Second is the scale at which he locates these models: Wikipedia, say, rather than the Internet as a whole. Similarly, the Maine lobster fishery, rather than the ocean as a whole, is a focus of CPR studies.

George Lakoff has emphasized that the commons is “not yet part of the frame structure that most people use every day.” Nor, in Portland, Ore. (where I live), would a meetup of self-styled communitarians fill the space that otherwise serves as a hangout for a group of knitting enthusiasts.

Still, amidst the rapid coevolution of the Net and its norms, we find that terms of relationality and sociality (e.g. reputation, identity) acquire fresh import. Reading the essays by David Weinberger and his respondents on the relative merits of tacit versus explicit governance – the two left-side quadrants on JZ’s matrix – I can’t help but smile. The discussion has come a long way since, say, Thatcher’s “no such thing as society.” Further exploration of that lower-left quadrant could add greatly to a variety of left-right, government-market debates. And perhaps, one day, to our framing as well.

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